I wasn't involved in the process at all but I saw the creation of this video. I just want to say that I was mind-blown how much work these KRAZAM puts into their videos. Just the mural on the whiteboard took them multiple hours - and, that's for a few seconds of the video. Unbelievable how much love is put into something. And, it sounds weird but really touching to see creatives do something that they truly love.
> Just the mural on the whiteboard took them multiple hours - and, that's for a few seconds of the video
This is the absolute funniest few seconds though, the mural combined with the way it was shot and the classic BWOOOOOOMP soundtrack in the background actually had me crying laughing. it’s so good
I was recently reading an article by a Twitter engineering team member discussing how they're reworking a microservice and kept expecting them to mention Galactus at some point. It lives rent-free in my head. This video is a true masterpiece.
I like to sneak in a Galactus reference during system design interview rounds when I feel like I'm about to overengineer the whole thing. I haven't done many recently, but for sure if I'm doing interview rounds, I will try to sneak in some Krazam references.
These are all great, and for me it's even weird to pick a favorite because somehow he's managed to put so much genius into all of those videos and in so many multifaceted ways, it's beyond me. What kind of job/career experience has he had to come up with all of that, so creatively and accurately?
I just don't get how he can have had all this experience and at the same time be able to come up with those creative videos while still holding those insights. Because there's so many clever little things implying he's seen a lot. And created those videos in parallel.
this signal the death of the passive aggressive "take this offline" for me
also favorite comment "This video captures the absolute weirdness of millennials and zoomers inheriting the bureaucratic systems created by baby boomers"
I find it weird how so much generation discussion seems to skip gen x. I see references to boomer, millennial, and zoomer/gen z way way more often than gen x.
Gen X’s arc was going from Reality Bites/Wayne’s World slacker grunge culture into the stultifying white collar Office Space of the Matrix and then disappearing from the zeitgeist entirely after 9/11 made Fight Club’s ending sort of real.
It's too clever and perfect - with all the cheese, and productivity messaging trying to make you insecure and everything with a corporate contrarian appeal. Everything Krazam is just so great writing down to detail.
“Coffee machine in back kitchen wont connect to internet”
(On an unrelated note, TIL that you can highlight text to copy/translate etc directly from a YouTube video on an iPhone. I knew you could do that from pictures but never thought to try videos until now.)
You can kinda implement the 'strangler pattern' for this kind of ticket toil. The tool scrapes the ticket queue, tries to do what it can, either it is successful and closes out the ticket or updates it with a new state of what it was able to achieve (if anything) and hands it back to the humans. You can start with only the most basic tickets and then slowly start to expand its scope and capabilities to handle more patterns and edge cases.
This is probably the smartest way to automate things. Replace the manual process bit by bit, leaving humans to deal with the trickier or less expected parts.
Shout outs to Shiva who has appeared in some videos but is often behind the camera so doesn't get enough recognition as being the other half of their duo :)
I've enjoyed Krazam's other videos, but at the risk of having the joke explained (and thus spoiled), what exactly is this lampooning? Not asking from a critical place, I legitimately am curious about dysfunctional business processes at other companies and want to know if people really are drowning in SaaS access requests
Lol, yes, you can extend this same bit to any team that deals with a lot of ops. Usually goes like this -
Too many requests come in for one team to handle. No budget to hire more bodies, or maybe you've already reached a point where that will no longer scale - the work can usually be automated completely, but stopping and taking the time to automate it will result in a 100% loaded team KPI's dropping significantly, meaning you'll almost never get management buy-in or any time to do it, leaving you in a perpetual cycle of manual work requests flooding in like in this scene.
I was kind of hoping the ending would be his tool worked and they all got laid off - actually seen this happen.
Personally I think the successful automation ending would've been "too satisfactory and perfect". Real life is not that.
I felt the video was relatable to me in many frequent situations where I would like to automatize some sort of process, but I end up being overly enthusiastic, because I'm so biased towards automating routineus activities. I frequently end up spending more time automating something than it would've been worth to just do it couple of times. I end up creating PoCs that don't entirely work in situations like those and the demos can fail, because I got bored at some point and didn't check thoroughly enough, so this video made me cringe at myself.
I do feel however that this was just one layer of this video, and the other layer is about the other side where manual processes are preferred for irrational reasons over automation, so I think this video accurately reflected all sides of the story. Automating vs doing something routineusly is a balancing and tolerance act.
I have fought this battle for my entire career. The problem is, incentives are tough - often senior engineers on ops teams have built the system on duct tape and bubble gum, and have a very specific and unobtainable knowledge about all the quirks of it which frequently involve a ton of manual, esoteric shit to resolve without a lot of know-how.
Part of how I’ve made myself useful as a consultant sometimes in my career is by insisting on a strict set of processes that break down and identify bottlenecks like this. It’s almost always ops, it almost always can be automated, but there’s “no bandwidth or budget” to fix the problems so they expect superheroes to constantly save the day by pulling absurd hours or by inventing genius solutions that management buys into.
For me, as an IC or sometimes as a consultant, I try to chip away. We spend X minutes a week doing Y thing manually. what’s the easiest thing we can do to reduce X? and then slowly introduce whatever arises out of those processes, and then slowly “eat the elephant” one bite at a time.
when people come into a big messy manual legacy system they often, imho, make the mistake of wanting to tear it down and recreate it from scratch. having done several cloud architecture/IAC refactors in my career, I can tell you its definitely a way easier sell to management and other teams to whittle away at it than to recreate it entirely, and i think that’s also what the video is poking fun at. There’s always skeletons that your perfect solution will run into. Processes, standards, and monitoring will expose these dead bodies, but it’s not a one shot solution and I’m immediately skeptical when anyone proposes something in this space that is. Every situation is a snowflake.
Yeah, I mean, I think this describes it. Ultimately the video had many thoughts and layers, starting with a charismatic lead who is proud or pretending to be proud about completely meaningless, arbitrary achievements and metrics trying to motivate his team for rejecting access requests. Then it goes on to this individual who just can't handle it. Which is relatable. I don't think I could be able to perform a job like this at all. So I think this individual there was just so badly misplaced for handling this type of work - he really wanted out from there, but unfortunately it is not always so simple. In an ideal world he would've worked in another role.
Yea, this video is definitely relatable to a lot of people in a lot of ways and that’s what I love about these. They hit hard. For me particularly, I have trouble selling to stubborn management teams to delay projects just a tiny bit to allow refactoring or adjustments to automate time wasting shit, and I abhor toil to the core of my being - so I will often get into situations like this guy and be like “fuck it I’m fixing it myself.”
I’ve had similar failures as in this video, lol. As a leader and as an IC. It hits really hard. If you’re ever in this situation you have to either leave, or exact whatever measures you have to fix it. Or face inevitable burnout. Those are the only choices or you will go mad.
Some other interesting thoughts I had about the video:
1. The team lead was somehow able to leave an impression of Matthew McConaughey from The Wolf of Wall Street so strongly, I don't know if that was intentional. The whole acting felt amazing actually in such a weird way...
2. The Slack sound effects, I assume this has to be traumatizing to everyone watching this video, right.
Personally, I was expecting him to solve the problem but then be faced with a "now you have 18 standards" problem of having to approve access to his new tool via tickets.
Yes. It's so bad where I work now that IT delegated approvals back to the managers. So now whenever you hire a new engineer, you have to click approve on all the systems they need access to do their job, because apparently RBAC doesn't scale to FAANG. And then they need to re-apply, and you need to re-approve, every year because virtually no accounts are 'forever' approved.
And since many of these are "per-seat" licensing, finance is always cajoling IT into aggressively culling unused accounts. Which makes it to these poor bastards's DMs early in the screen, and the corresponding IT ticket hell of people requesting their access back.
The punchline at the end is basically just hubris: you've solved the megacorp RBAC problem in your head, but trip over the BS logistics of it all. Probably because your application doesn't have network permissions or some other ironic problem.
I find the ending particularly funny, we have a small team where we're often building things in-house that we should probably just buy, or rely on manual processes for.
The fumbling with "oops, there's some test data in here" and the issues with the service worker hit a little close to home from some of our demos I've been a part of.
It's about this weird urge that smart people sometimes feel in jobs that they feel are beneath their talents, to radically improve efficiency even when it really does not make sense to do so in context of who they are and what their job is.
If you've ever worked in an org that has to be SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) compliant, then you are familiar with a bunch of what's happening in this video. So much of your data, infra, and internal tools have to be gated by authorization and access logging tools -- so employees are constantly requesting access to the tools they need to get their work done.
These requests can be granted manually or automatically but they need to be logged and stored. Sometimes requests are required for every single access of a tool and sometimes it's time period based (24 hour access to Redshift or whatever) -- usually this depends on your role in an org. There isn't a coherent out-of-the-box way to provide the authorization and access gateways across all the different tools a business relies on -- so there is a big business opportunity for companies to basically provide turnkey identity and access management tools for companies.
Or, occasionally, an engineer loses their mind with the inefficiencies of these systems and processes and goes off on a jag to create the perfect internal tool to solve all these problems. That rarely (if ever) works, hence the video.
What I don't get here is the title. It's either referring to the employee who goes and creates the autonomous system, or even the system itself, but is "high agency" a corp buzzword the same way IC is?
Another easter egg: Hagoromo chalk! Only the best if you’re creating diagrams that cover an entire wall. (Word of advice I recorded from a math professor who had brilliant boardwork: you can never make a blackboard diagram too large.)
This is obviously satire, but a significant problem organizations have as they scale is maintaining good taste--recognizing good solutions when they are presented.
Simply put, if that packet with a plan to automate away an entire department existed and was on a conference room table, no one would connect it to the business's bottom line. It would just go unnoticed. A typical corporate America manager would be unable to comprehend that something valuable was created that they were not asked to produce by their manager, and they did not ask their team to produce.
If it was tied to their salary they would absolutely care, but otherwise it's just one line item during a performance review that someone might or might not care about at all, because politics matter more during performance reviews.
The slack notification noise triggered me to check Slack frantically in case i was mentioned, but there was nothing. Slack really has us conditioned well.
SaaSiroth is a combination of the acronym SaaS meaning “software as a service”, and the “Sephiroth” of Jewish mysticism.
The diagram on the front page and blackboard in the video is a representation of the Sephiroth, the Jewish Kabbalistic tree of life. It’s something to do with Jewish metaphysics and cosmogony, but it’s very esoteric, may you have better luck making sense of it than I!
Instead of the “ten emanations” of Kabbalah, the diagram in the video contains concepts from the technical domain of Identity and Access Management (IAM).
I wasn't involved in the process at all but I saw the creation of this video. I just want to say that I was mind-blown how much work these KRAZAM puts into their videos. Just the mural on the whiteboard took them multiple hours - and, that's for a few seconds of the video. Unbelievable how much love is put into something. And, it sounds weird but really touching to see creatives do something that they truly love.
I loved the Tree of Life reference, I want something like that printed out and put it next to my highly effective pyramid of success.
hunting for easter eggs, I found that https://www.saasiroth.com is an actual site and it contains the full manifesto. crazy.
Great find! Try logging in 4 times to be redirected to:
https://www.lumos.com/
Surely you mean the Conjoined Triangles of Success?
> Just the mural on the whiteboard took them multiple hours - and, that's for a few seconds of the video
This is the absolute funniest few seconds though, the mural combined with the way it was shot and the classic BWOOOOOOMP soundtrack in the background actually had me crying laughing. it’s so good
Piggybacking to recommend another video of his, "The Hustle", which is a fast-paced memefest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
"Microservices" will always be my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
Positive Affirmations for Site Reliability Engineers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8Q51ouA_s&pp=ygUGa3JhemFt
this hit so close to home I didn't know whether to laugh or cry
I was recently reading an article by a Twitter engineering team member discussing how they're reworking a microservice and kept expecting them to mention Galactus at some point. It lives rent-free in my head. This video is a true masterpiece.
I like to sneak in a Galactus reference during system design interview rounds when I feel like I'm about to overengineer the whole thing. I haven't done many recently, but for sure if I'm doing interview rounds, I will try to sneak in some Krazam references.
Mine is "leadership sync":
https://youtu.be/1RAMRukKqQg?si=K02Vsl7UhiUHos06
If you ever worked in a dysfunctional org this video speaks volumes.
These are all great, and for me it's even weird to pick a favorite because somehow he's managed to put so much genius into all of those videos and in so many multifaceted ways, it's beyond me. What kind of job/career experience has he had to come up with all of that, so creatively and accurately?
I just don't get how he can have had all this experience and at the same time be able to come up with those creative videos while still holding those insights. Because there's so many clever little things implying he's seen a lot. And created those videos in parallel.
> What kind of job/career experience has he had to come up with all of that, so creatively and accurately?
One of them has been at Amazon for a while.
Seems like an accurate set of experiences of a 10-20 years long career.
this signal the death of the passive aggressive "take this offline" for me
also favorite comment "This video captures the absolute weirdness of millennials and zoomers inheriting the bureaucratic systems created by baby boomers"
I find it weird how so much generation discussion seems to skip gen x. I see references to boomer, millennial, and zoomer/gen z way way more often than gen x.
Gen X’s arc was going from Reality Bites/Wayne’s World slacker grunge culture into the stultifying white collar Office Space of the Matrix and then disappearing from the zeitgeist entirely after 9/11 made Fight Club’s ending sort of real.
As a Genuine Millennial (1986) who works around a lot of Gen X, I don't really perceive much of a difference between us tbh.
We are the "meh" generation -- I'm happy we're overlooked.
For me its Microservices and the whole Senior Engineer video (and especially the outtakes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoH15ylAeo
Gotta go get my new shipment of caterpillars. Astral Plane combat ftw.
Their commercial is a low-key banger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duJwGSUhRQA
It's too clever and perfect - with all the cheese, and productivity messaging trying to make you insecure and everything with a corporate contrarian appeal. Everything Krazam is just so great writing down to detail.
for a few seconds I thought he was describing OAuth and OpenID... /j
“Need Salesfroce access ASAP for client meeting”
“Coffee machine in back kitchen wont connect to internet”
(On an unrelated note, TIL that you can highlight text to copy/translate etc directly from a YouTube video on an iPhone. I knew you could do that from pictures but never thought to try videos until now.)
> “Coffee machine in back kitchen wont connect to internet"
I think that was a reference to the 1998 April Fool's Day RFC protocol HTCPCP [0].
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324
You can kinda implement the 'strangler pattern' for this kind of ticket toil. The tool scrapes the ticket queue, tries to do what it can, either it is successful and closes out the ticket or updates it with a new state of what it was able to achieve (if anything) and hands it back to the humans. You can start with only the most basic tickets and then slowly start to expand its scope and capabilities to handle more patterns and edge cases.
Forget doing any of that until the OmegaStar finally ships, though.
This is probably the smartest way to automate things. Replace the manual process bit by bit, leaving humans to deal with the trickier or less expected parts.
Shout outs to Shiva who has appeared in some videos but is often behind the camera so doesn't get enough recognition as being the other half of their duo :)
"they said there's nothing under the sun in I.T. solutions"
I can't tell if this is a mistake or an intentional 3D-chess level joke. I love it.
I've enjoyed Krazam's other videos, but at the risk of having the joke explained (and thus spoiled), what exactly is this lampooning? Not asking from a critical place, I legitimately am curious about dysfunctional business processes at other companies and want to know if people really are drowning in SaaS access requests
Lol, yes, you can extend this same bit to any team that deals with a lot of ops. Usually goes like this -
Too many requests come in for one team to handle. No budget to hire more bodies, or maybe you've already reached a point where that will no longer scale - the work can usually be automated completely, but stopping and taking the time to automate it will result in a 100% loaded team KPI's dropping significantly, meaning you'll almost never get management buy-in or any time to do it, leaving you in a perpetual cycle of manual work requests flooding in like in this scene.
I was kind of hoping the ending would be his tool worked and they all got laid off - actually seen this happen.
Personally I think the successful automation ending would've been "too satisfactory and perfect". Real life is not that.
I felt the video was relatable to me in many frequent situations where I would like to automatize some sort of process, but I end up being overly enthusiastic, because I'm so biased towards automating routineus activities. I frequently end up spending more time automating something than it would've been worth to just do it couple of times. I end up creating PoCs that don't entirely work in situations like those and the demos can fail, because I got bored at some point and didn't check thoroughly enough, so this video made me cringe at myself.
I do feel however that this was just one layer of this video, and the other layer is about the other side where manual processes are preferred for irrational reasons over automation, so I think this video accurately reflected all sides of the story. Automating vs doing something routineusly is a balancing and tolerance act.
I have fought this battle for my entire career. The problem is, incentives are tough - often senior engineers on ops teams have built the system on duct tape and bubble gum, and have a very specific and unobtainable knowledge about all the quirks of it which frequently involve a ton of manual, esoteric shit to resolve without a lot of know-how.
Part of how I’ve made myself useful as a consultant sometimes in my career is by insisting on a strict set of processes that break down and identify bottlenecks like this. It’s almost always ops, it almost always can be automated, but there’s “no bandwidth or budget” to fix the problems so they expect superheroes to constantly save the day by pulling absurd hours or by inventing genius solutions that management buys into.
For me, as an IC or sometimes as a consultant, I try to chip away. We spend X minutes a week doing Y thing manually. what’s the easiest thing we can do to reduce X? and then slowly introduce whatever arises out of those processes, and then slowly “eat the elephant” one bite at a time.
when people come into a big messy manual legacy system they often, imho, make the mistake of wanting to tear it down and recreate it from scratch. having done several cloud architecture/IAC refactors in my career, I can tell you its definitely a way easier sell to management and other teams to whittle away at it than to recreate it entirely, and i think that’s also what the video is poking fun at. There’s always skeletons that your perfect solution will run into. Processes, standards, and monitoring will expose these dead bodies, but it’s not a one shot solution and I’m immediately skeptical when anyone proposes something in this space that is. Every situation is a snowflake.
> Every situation is a snowflake.
Yeah, I mean, I think this describes it. Ultimately the video had many thoughts and layers, starting with a charismatic lead who is proud or pretending to be proud about completely meaningless, arbitrary achievements and metrics trying to motivate his team for rejecting access requests. Then it goes on to this individual who just can't handle it. Which is relatable. I don't think I could be able to perform a job like this at all. So I think this individual there was just so badly misplaced for handling this type of work - he really wanted out from there, but unfortunately it is not always so simple. In an ideal world he would've worked in another role.
Yea, this video is definitely relatable to a lot of people in a lot of ways and that’s what I love about these. They hit hard. For me particularly, I have trouble selling to stubborn management teams to delay projects just a tiny bit to allow refactoring or adjustments to automate time wasting shit, and I abhor toil to the core of my being - so I will often get into situations like this guy and be like “fuck it I’m fixing it myself.”
I’ve had similar failures as in this video, lol. As a leader and as an IC. It hits really hard. If you’re ever in this situation you have to either leave, or exact whatever measures you have to fix it. Or face inevitable burnout. Those are the only choices or you will go mad.
Some other interesting thoughts I had about the video:
1. The team lead was somehow able to leave an impression of Matthew McConaughey from The Wolf of Wall Street so strongly, I don't know if that was intentional. The whole acting felt amazing actually in such a weird way...
2. The Slack sound effects, I assume this has to be traumatizing to everyone watching this video, right.
Personally, I was expecting him to solve the problem but then be faced with a "now you have 18 standards" problem of having to approve access to his new tool via tickets.
Yes. It's so bad where I work now that IT delegated approvals back to the managers. So now whenever you hire a new engineer, you have to click approve on all the systems they need access to do their job, because apparently RBAC doesn't scale to FAANG. And then they need to re-apply, and you need to re-approve, every year because virtually no accounts are 'forever' approved.
And since many of these are "per-seat" licensing, finance is always cajoling IT into aggressively culling unused accounts. Which makes it to these poor bastards's DMs early in the screen, and the corresponding IT ticket hell of people requesting their access back.
The punchline at the end is basically just hubris: you've solved the megacorp RBAC problem in your head, but trip over the BS logistics of it all. Probably because your application doesn't have network permissions or some other ironic problem.
I find the ending particularly funny, we have a small team where we're often building things in-house that we should probably just buy, or rely on manual processes for.
The fumbling with "oops, there's some test data in here" and the issues with the service worker hit a little close to home from some of our demos I've been a part of.
It's not that.
It's about this weird urge that smart people sometimes feel in jobs that they feel are beneath their talents, to radically improve efficiency even when it really does not make sense to do so in context of who they are and what their job is.
If you've ever worked in an org that has to be SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) compliant, then you are familiar with a bunch of what's happening in this video. So much of your data, infra, and internal tools have to be gated by authorization and access logging tools -- so employees are constantly requesting access to the tools they need to get their work done.
These requests can be granted manually or automatically but they need to be logged and stored. Sometimes requests are required for every single access of a tool and sometimes it's time period based (24 hour access to Redshift or whatever) -- usually this depends on your role in an org. There isn't a coherent out-of-the-box way to provide the authorization and access gateways across all the different tools a business relies on -- so there is a big business opportunity for companies to basically provide turnkey identity and access management tools for companies.
Or, occasionally, an engineer loses their mind with the inefficiencies of these systems and processes and goes off on a jag to create the perfect internal tool to solve all these problems. That rarely (if ever) works, hence the video.
I think this is an ad for Lumos
What I don't get here is the title. It's either referring to the employee who goes and creates the autonomous system, or even the system itself, but is "high agency" a corp buzzword the same way IC is?
I assume it means that he used his free time + company time (w/out asking) to solve a company problem
N-Dimensional Identity Prism
Gaia nightmares resonating...
Another easter egg: Hagoromo chalk! Only the best if you’re creating diagrams that cover an entire wall. (Word of advice I recorded from a math professor who had brilliant boardwork: you can never make a blackboard diagram too large.)
Those last 30 seconds of the video, trying to get the demo to work for a group of people is so relatable.
This is obviously satire, but a significant problem organizations have as they scale is maintaining good taste--recognizing good solutions when they are presented.
Simply put, if that packet with a plan to automate away an entire department existed and was on a conference room table, no one would connect it to the business's bottom line. It would just go unnoticed. A typical corporate America manager would be unable to comprehend that something valuable was created that they were not asked to produce by their manager, and they did not ask their team to produce.
If it was tied to their salary they would absolutely care, but otherwise it's just one line item during a performance review that someone might or might not care about at all, because politics matter more during performance reviews.
The slack notification noise triggered me to check Slack frantically in case i was mentioned, but there was nothing. Slack really has us conditioned well.
"SaaSiroth" seems to be an inside joke. Anyone know what it points to?
Also, please feel free to list other inside jokes in the video. I could see lots of potential ones, including the oil barrel.
SaaSiroth is a combination of the acronym SaaS meaning “software as a service”, and the “Sephiroth” of Jewish mysticism.
The diagram on the front page and blackboard in the video is a representation of the Sephiroth, the Jewish Kabbalistic tree of life. It’s something to do with Jewish metaphysics and cosmogony, but it’s very esoteric, may you have better luck making sense of it than I!
Instead of the “ten emanations” of Kabbalah, the diagram in the video contains concepts from the technical domain of Identity and Access Management (IAM).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefirot
I'm 99% sure they were referencing evangelion's use:
https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/Tree_of_Life
(which if you haven't watched it's strange but I think for most hackers you'd vibe with it)